Inadmissible evidence..........................................................................................................13

Closing statements and instructions.....................................................................................14

Posttrial matters and sentencing...........................................................................................14

What Happens After the Trial?......................................................................................................14

Appellate court procedure....................................................................................................16

The United States Supreme Court........................................................................................17

Glossary.........................................................................................................................................19

What Is a Court?

A court is an institution that is set up by the government to settle disputes through a legal process. Disputes come to court when people can’t agree about what happened: Did Bill Jones run a red light before his car ran into John Smith’s, or was the light green, as he says it was? Did Frank Williams rob the bank, or was it his twin brother, Joe?

Courts decide what really happened and what should be done about it: If the accident was Jones’s fault, how much should he pay Smith for the damage he did? If Williams did rob the bank, how should he be punished?

Courts play an important role in our society for a number of reasons. They decide whether a person committed a crime and what the punishment should be. They also provide a peaceful way to decide private disputes that people can’t resolve between themselves. Sometimes, a court decision affects people other than the individuals who are involved in the lawsuit. In 1965, three high school students in Des Montes, Iowa, were suspended from school for wearing black armbands to protest the war in Vietnam. They went to court to have the rule against armbands declared invalid. When the Supreme Court decided in Tinker v. Des Moines School District that the rule violated the student’s constitutional right of freedom of expression, that decision affected the rights of public school students all over the country to express their views in a nondisruptive manner. The Supreme Court’s 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education had an even more widespread effect. The case settled a dispute between the parents of Linda Brown and their local board of education in Topeka, Kansas. The court decided that requiring white children and black children to go to separate schools violated the Constitution.

What Is a Federal Court?

You probably realize that there are both federal and state courts. The two kinds of courts are a result of a feature of American Constitution called federalism. Federalism gives some functions to the United States government, while leaving the other functions to the states. The functions of the US – or federal – government involve the nation as a whole and include tasks such as cleaning up national waterways, providing for the national defense, and supervising national parks. State governments perform most of the functions you probably connect with “government”, such as running the schools, managing the police departments, and paving the streets.

Federal courts are established by the US government to decide disputes concerning the federal Constitution and laws passed by Congress, called statutes. State courts are established by a state, or by a county or city within the states. Although state courts must enforce the federal Constitution and laws, most of the cases they decide involve the constitution and laws of the particular state.